Hey, It's Jade!

Friday, July 13, 2012

Homeschool Recap, July 13th (Week 1)...

In my life this week...Oh, you know... busy, busy. Early this week, we were playing outside in a rare moment of cooler weather and Preston got ant bites on his arm. He FREAKED OUT! Got them off, got him calmed down, told him to go take a shower because he was all squirmy and felt gross, he said. After that, he came back outside and said he still felt all itchy. I looked at his stomach and nearly freaked out myself! He had hives across his front and back and very thick up his neck. It was scary! Thankfully, after some Benadryl, they calmed down and were gone completely the next day. The ant bites blistered. Yuck! Poor guy... it was crazy.

Chest and neck were covered.

Back looked awful!

In our Homeschool this week...
Our first week was a bit wonky. Not in a bad way, just a busy way. We ended up having to rearrange most of things I had planned out for each day so that we could do OTHER things. Hello, that's the fabulous thing about being a homeschool family... we have time for OTHER things and can rearrange school! Awesome!!! We got to do a P.E. Day at the gym with our homeschool group on Wednesday. And Thursday we had to fog our house because Michael keeps getting eaten up by something so that took most of the day... leaving while it fogged, then coming back and cleaning everything up.

Ready to start school. Or at least have breakfast.

Tot School: I am still working on what I plan to do with Callen. I have started printing and preparing the A-Z pack from 1+1+1=1 and I think he'll have a lot of fun with that. He LOVES dry-erase. A friend of mine introduced me to Crayola's Dry-Erase Crayons... oh my word, y'all... life changer! Wayyyy less messy, doesn't get all over hands and clothes (and if it does, WASHABLE!). So, he's been coloring this week. And we started using the Mama Jenn Education Cubes. Right now we are doing the Alphabet Movements. We take turns throwing down a cube and do whatever it says. For example, "U is for unicyle..." and this is what we did, lol:

They both had a blast with this activity!

Bible: I introduced Preston to his new Bible that we'll be using this year: The Discoverer's Bible. He is so excited because all of his previous Bibles were written as stories, not actual verses and he was always using mine to read verses! This week were talking about the importance of names. We talked about his name and I wrote him a letter explaining how we chose his name. We didn't do the "name activity" this week because we just simply did not have time and I didn't really ever make a plan for it, ha.

Reading/Writing: We started Spelling by Sound & Structure. The words were super easy and we zipped right through those lessons, no problem. I also started Preston on just doing some alphabet writing practice because he still has some letters that just do not come out right usually. Like the letter 'a.' He is very stubborn when it comes to writing and wants to do them HIS way, which usually means... you can't tell it's an 'a.' Sigh.

History: We started off our study of American History by reading America: A Patriotic Primer. We also reviewed how to read maps... Preston and Callen colored maps of the U.S. and a map of the World. The first two days of school we learned about the Pledge of Allegiance. Preston already pretty much had it down, but we went over some definitions of big words he wasn't completely sure about. We also read a couple of little books that helped bring home the message: I Pledge Allegiance by Bill Martin and I Pledge Allegiance by June Swanson. On Friday, we learned about vikings including Eric the Red and Leif Ericsson and how he sailed to North America and we put good 'ole Leif up on our Timeline. We read Who Were the Vikings?, Eric the Red and the Magic Treehouse Book #15 Viking Ships at Sunrise.

Coloring the "other states" in.

Coloring "sates!"

Math: Started up our Math Mammoth workbook. He is doing really well with adding and subtracting... we reviewed simple things like ordinal numbers, fact families, even and odd, etc. Nothing too exciting.

Working on some Math.

Science: We read several pages in our Encyclopedia of Science about what science is and what scientists do. Did the floating egg experiment, which Preston thought was SO COOL!

Spanish: Preston and Callen both enjoyed the first two episodes of Salsa, which is the story of Goldilocks & The Three Bears, but in Spanish, obviously. And I sat with Preston and reviewed words having to do with "La Casa" in our First Thousand Words in Spanish. I love that we can use the online pronunciation key... because every once in a while I can really butcher a word. Lol.

Using the iPad to pronounce words for us!

And there we are... the first full week of school is history! No major catastrophes (school-wise, anyway) to report, no serious meltdowns... so far, so good.

We are using Adventures in My Father's World. See our curriculum here.

[This post contains affiliate links for Usborne Books & More and Amazon.com. By clicking on those links and purchasing items, you are helping me continue to be a SAHM so that I can focus on homeschooling my children! Thank you!]